These Aramaic words,
a Hebrew of the streets,
tonight, do not fall easily from my lips.
Their opening line:
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba
familiar, comes fumbling off my tongue,
a recalled echo across this corridor of decades
since I first stood in that spare hospital room
intoning them for you.
Shadows mingle
with phantom images of our last years and months,
infused with your illness,
linger now
as does our mutual estrangement:
Yours—from a once-vibrant body,
grasping at those last bits of life.
Mine—from grappling with that potent brew
of love and horror
from our ever-tangled relationship
Now both fingers and feet
go in search for a poet’s words to contain them.
So many times,
I’ve sought to gather their shreds and scraps—
to weave and stitch them
into a wearable fabric,
but that suit never fit.
A stalled heart
remained hungry
for that nourishment:
A final reconciliation might have offered,
a vision I kept,
despite the silent gulf
lingering between us.
Reaching to hold your hand,
I summoned search parties of prayer
calling out to locate you,
so lost in the fog
of our brief terminal visits.
Tonight again,
like so many Shabbat evenings
I sit again among a congregation
in both prayer and memory.
Soon I will rise
to bear witness to you
once more in these ancient words.
Regrets and questions will still beckon,
dancing in the silent spaces between them.
But this Yahrzeit
another anniversary of your passing—
grabs me differently.
It enfolds me in another prayer shawl,
summons me to a threshold,
its mystic alchemy
spilling a clearer invitation.
My lips begin to embrace those concluding lines:
Oseh shalom bimromav, hu yaaseh shalom,
Aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael, v’imru…
And with their AMEN
I push open that door—
so fists long clenched
may become palms raised up,
in welcome.
This poem is an excerpt from Section II “Ritual and Reckoning” from the forthcoming poetic memoir Memories-Fierce and Tender.
